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The cyber world is faced with two major challenges; users are not aware of the usage of images online and related licensing options, and rights holders are unable to prove ownership of their digital work or derivative content. They don’t have efficient tools to track the usage of their copyrighted images and spot the image theft. The current and potential features of COPYTRACK solve these key industry issues.
About COPYTRACK
COPYTRACK, a German anti-piracy company, brings the first online platform dedicated to photographers and agencies, letting them track image theft and online copyright infringements globally. COPYTRACK effectively handles the licensing of publishers, news agencies, and photographers online in order to protect their image rights. The platform’s coverage is huge since it is currently operating in more than 140 countries through its global network of lawyers to tackle image theft cases.
How does COPYTRACK work?
At the heart of COPYTRACK is the global, decentralized copyright register for digital content that verifies users and links digital intellectual property. The platform works using a unique engine that searches COPYTRACK’s clients’ images over the web. Users can sort the search outcomes and report the copyright violation if any. With every new claim, COPYTRACK’s legal team starts the enforcement process.
The Current Technical Features
COPYTRACK is the first online platform of its kind that has already launched various exclusive features for the users, even before its ICO that is going to start from January 10, 2018. While the pre-sale of COPYTRACK is going on, a lot of features are already developed and in use, including:
- High-Performance-Web-Crawler: It searches an infinite number of websites every day.
- Unique Image Matching: This engine compares users’ images with all the findings and detects all editing activities like cropping, color changes etc.
- Automatic Evidence: The evidence of stolen images are secured on an auto basis so that enforcement can be done successfully.
- Period of Use: Users can find out how long their image was being used online.
- Compensation Value: Compensation value is calculated automatically via in-built evaluation matrix.
- Rights Clearing Portal: It informs the violating party about the case and evidence, to prove legal licensing or potentially license the image including online payment.
- Infringing Party Detection: The platform’s state-of-the-art bots gather all information about the infringing party and from targeted websites.
- PCI compliance: The platform follows the highest PCI security standards (bank-level).
What’s Coming Up Next?
The on-going pre-sale and the upcoming main ICO of COPYTRACK intend to fund the development of more novel features for its users worldwide. In future, users will be enjoying the following features:
- Global Copyright Register where Right owners’ information will be saved in a decentralized fashion as hashes in the blockchain.
- Transparent Licensing Information to be stored as hash in blockchain and includes right owners, right users and licensing terms.
- The right owners will get Digital Copyright Certifications for each image.
- Copyright and License Control is ensured as all images will be controlled for authorized use as per licensing periods.
- Automatic licensing, renewals and abonnements for images will be enabled.
- Fully transparent and instant payment through CPY token will be enabled within COPYTRACK ecosystem, excluding current international bank fees.
- External Services will be available for the external users to execute reverse image search, track licensing information and research of rights owners.
- COPYTRACK is an Open System as its blockchain features are applicable to other kinds of digital content including music, video etc.
COPYTRACK has set an example as a transparent, global, decentralized register for copyrights of digital content, and it will be bringing new developments in near future to increase the “fairness quotient” of the internet.
To know more about the platform and to participate in its on-going pre-sale, please visit https://COPYTRACK.io/
Chris Backe 
Marcus Schmitt 
Content creator here. Written dozens of books, lots of blog posts…
I wanted to like this concept. Sure, it’s ‘registered’ on the blockchain, but registration is not the problem. Enforcement and collection is.
Anyone that’s used Copytrack the service is aware of its biggest flaw — it’s very picky about who it goes after. It doesn’t go after small-time operators or social networks. They’ll only go after well-heeled corporate types because the threat of a lawsuit will scare them. They’re not going to go after Joe Schmo on Facebook or a teeny tiny blogger they’d likely be unable to locate. The bigger businesses are quickly learning they can’t rip art / content off the internet and re-use it without a license, so what happens when that number is super-low?
Dear Chris,
thank you for your comment on that.
There are two aspects:
1. Going after business and/or private individuals
COPYTRACK commits to certain ethics. Among those is to be fair an just. This is why we decided to only go after businesses. Their intention is to make money with the stolen images. Private individuals most of the time are not aware of the illegal actions and are not intending to make money with these images. So for us besides business ethics and fairness it´s also a „Good Karma“ decision.
However we will shortly coming up with a pure „Take Down” product. Then we will also show the results of private use of images and you will be able to at least notify them about the illegal use and request to take the images down.
2. Market size
It would be great if COPYTRACK would have that „educational effect“ and business would not steal images any more. However this is very likely not going to happen because of the pure mass of images uploaded every day (2bn) and the pure mass of businesses world wide. So no worries at that end at all!
COPYTRACK was & is aware of the fact that global right enforcement is a huge task. This is why we are setup truly global and besides our worldwide search engine, we operate a network of lawyers in 140 countries. It´s a huge effort and it is a lot of learnings about legal systems – but we made it.
So in total we are a bit proud to be able to offer such a comprehensive end to end service to our clients worldwide and would be happy to make you a fan of COPYTRACK as well.
Best,
Marcus
(CEO of COPYTRACK)
Marcus, I appreciate your response.
Are bloggers not also using other people’s photos? Stories of people on social networks ripping off other people’s work are everywhere, but Copytrack and this new system will choose to do nothing about them. Sure, it’s great to go after big businesses and actually make money off of them, but all this does is send the message that private, non-commercial blogs can violate copyright at will with impunity. If Copytrack is unable to stop copyright theft at that level, how and why would we trust them at other levels?
Further, countries well-known for plagiarism and content theft don’t fear the (typically corrupt and/or weak) legal systems at play in those countries. Anytime it takes months (or years) to work a case through a legal system, a business can afford to wait it out. Actually taking that case to court also doesn’t guarantee a win, either. If you’ve actually won a case against, say, a Vietnamese business (and that’s a *case*, not a *settlement*), I’d love to read about it.
I’m actually a current customer of Copytrack, and logging into the dashboard shows I have 576 ‘hits’ of potential infringement. The technology scanning the internet for these photos is good, but very much in need of further improvement in the identification process. Many are simply similar photos, but others are laughably off.
If the mindset of ‘we won’t go after non-commercial blogs and social network users’ is correct, it needs to be upfront. I don’t recall seeing this fact stated anywhere on the site, and only learned it in the denial of the claim. Those sites should be whitelisted automatically — as it is right now, the user is left to do that themselves.
The result is a lot of noise and a waste of time – hundreds (or thousands) of photos to look through to find a needle in a haystack. A user then finds a few that are demonstrably infringing, only to realize they’re on a non-commercial site or social media site that Copytrack won’t pursue…
Hi Chris,
we understand the issue you are addressing and appreciate that you do so. Many of the features we ad to our system originate in requests of our clients – like yours.
If it is about bloggers, we have two (three) categories:
1. Bloggers we can clearly identify because they have their own domain
These we can track down and we also proceed cases if there is a commercial background – like advertisement on that page etc. If there is no commercial background the future take-down feature will solve that.
2. Bloggers using bolg pages among many other bloggers
Here they often hide behind an alias and all we can do is request the blog page operator to take down the bolg. This will be possible as soon as our take down service is online.
(3.) User generated content
This is legally impossible – again we can only contact the blog page operator to take it down.
“Difficult” Countries:
We can of course not do much against cases in countries with “difficult” legal and cultural environment and the habit of plagiarism. However for all of the countries we are active in, we analyzed the best possible way to proceed, which can also mean that we close a case at a certain point in order to save your (and our) time. It is of course not too satisfying but there is nothing much we can do. We have processed many cases successfully in countries that are difficult to proceed – even in China! So we are doing our best here.
Make you work easier:
We have built in many features that make your work a lot easier and we are aware that some of our clients are not aware of all the features we constantly ad.
One great feature is the opportunity the filter by country of the infringing party – this way you could focus to work on the hits & cases in the countries where legal enforcement is working well: Europe in general, USA, Canada, Japan, etc. – you might want to work on China, Africa, etc. a bit later…
So trust us that we will ad more valuable features and processes constantly and try to meet our clients and your needs. Feel free to address those ideas and suggestions to our client service or to me directly – you will find an open ear.
Hi Chris,
we understand the issue you are addressing and appreciate that you do so. Many of the features we ad to our system originate in requests of our clients – like yours.
If it is about bloggers, we have two (three) categories:
1. Bloggers we can clearly identify because they have their own domain
These we can track down and we also proceed cases if there is a commercial background – like advertisement on that page etc. If there is no commercial background the future take-down feature will solve that.
2. Bloggers using bolg pages among many other bloggers
Here they often hide behind an alias and all we can do is request the blog page operator to take down the bolg. This will be possible as soon as our take down service is online.
(3.) User generated content
This is legally impossible – again we can only contact the blog page operator to take it down.
“Difficult” Countries:
We can of course not do much against cases in countries with “difficult” legal and cultural environment and the habit of plagiarism. However for all of the countries we are active in, we analyzed the best possible way to proceed, which can also mean that we close a case at a certain point in order to save your (and our) time. It is of course not too satisfying but there is nothing much we can do. We have processed many cases successfully in countries that are difficult to proceed – even in China! So we are doing our best here.
Make you work easier:
We have built in many features that make your work a lot easier and we are aware that some of our clients are not aware of all the features we constantly ad.
One great feature is the opportunity the filter by country of the infringing party – this way you could focus to work on the hits & cases in the countries where legal enforcement is working well: Europe in general, USA, Canada, Japan, etc. – you might want to work on China, Africa, etc. a bit later…
So trust us that we will ad more valuable features and processes constantly and try to meet our clients and your needs. Feel free to address those ideas and suggestions to our client service or to me directly – you will find an open ear.
Best,
Marcus
@disqus_zgRylaaAuP:disqus Can you please explain the UTILITY of the CPY token? From reading the whitepaper, which is very sparse in any kind of details, it seems like the token will only have utility (value) in Q2 2019 once the content marketplace opens up? Is this correct or is there additional token utility outside of the marketplace?
As a professional photographer who has already used Copytrack’s current service, I still do not see what improvement a blockchain-based workflow would have over the current system. As you must already be aware, blockchain copyright registration will offer NO addition legal benefit or increase potential claim amounts as current USCO registration process does.
On the contrary, the marketplace concept is very interesting, but according to your road map that is a long way off still and there many are other players in this market… It will take much more than a functioning marketplace to achieve any kind of market share and revenue stream for photographers. What are future plans regarding marketing, sales team, etc. once the marketplace goes live?
Also would you be willing to comment on the relatively large amount of tokens (40%) which will NOT be publicly distributed but instead stay in the hands of founders?
These are my major concerns regarding participation as an investor in the ICO. As a photographer, I’d love to see it succeed, but as an investor, I see a lot of red flags and holes in your whitepaper and underlying concept.